AUGUST 123 



the captor of the humble gudgeon, the chief and only 

 pleasure felt is to be reckoned inversely to the ease with 

 which the prize is taken. The average dry-fly man 

 swears by his method as the only form of true sport ; 

 but he, one is inclined to imagine, would think little or 

 nothing of it, if every yard of river contained trout so 

 innocent and confiding that each cast, no matter how 

 clumsy, would bring another tenant to his creel. And so 

 it is with the pursuit of so-called coarse fish, so much 

 looked down upon and scorned by the average wielder of 

 the fly-rod; this despised branch of angling is every 

 day growing to be finer art. Those of us who have read 

 Mr. Senior's article in the Badminton " Fishing " volume 

 and Mr. Greville Ffennell's " Book of the Roach " know 

 what is to be said for " Roach Fishing as a Fine Art," 

 and the same may be written of nearly every other 

 member of that numerous family, the carps, of which 

 that fish is one of the leading representatives. When 

 one reads of the carp fishing practised in India, recorded 

 in The Field, where the flash of the rod scares 

 the quarry for the day, and therefore the fish-pole must 

 be laid down and the bait thrown by hand, who will deny 

 the title of sport to a method of angling requiring such 

 skill and knowledge ? But why go further afield than 

 the lakes and rivers of our own country ? The capture 

 of a large, shy, educated carp will provide a task suffi- 

 cient to daunt the most persevering, for even when the 

 strike is made the advantage is still to the quarry. 

 What patience may be thus expended is easily shown by 

 the fact recently recorded in The Fishing Gazette, 

 namely, that an angler had fished for carp in one lake 

 nearly every week during the summer for seven years, 

 and never had succeeded in landing one, though no doubt 

 he had hooked and lost many, during this long period. 



Carp fishing, as an amusement, requires, as the 

 Scotchman said of olives, ' eyther a cultivawted pawlate 

 or a grawn* awpetite." The average London fisherman 

 has both, as a rule, for several reasons, the chief of 

 which are that he doesn't get much fishing, and what 

 there is of it is made up of water not easily accessible, 



